Collection Separation

So since I had been collecting from 1995 to about 1998 I had a lot of older cards, Alpha to Exodus.  On top of that my father kept collecting through Urza's Destiny so there were many other cards that I needed to sort into the collection.  I should add that my father and I played around the same time, seeing as how he was the one who got me into MTG, and now the collection consisted of his cards as well as my old ones.

I had played MTG on and off with friends from 2000 to 2007 and then I stopped to concentrate on work.  Then when I started my new job, I was travelling a lot, and my boss used to play Dungeons & Dragons, so we went up to Target and picked up a Magic 2011 Starter Tool Kit and some packs.  We then started to play on a regular basis, buying New Phyrexia and Innistrad and beyond.

So I had close to 80,000 cards pre Urza's Destiny, and a growing collection of the new cards, but I was missing 8 years of sets that had come out that I did not have.  I also missed out on all the Premium Decks, From the Vault, Duel Decks, and Commander decks.

So first I needed to separate the older card with the newer cards, but the problem I hit, that there were new play deck versions that you could play.  Back when I used to play there were only 3 playing types:

Type 1 - All cards with a restriction and banned list

Type 1.5 - All cards with a banned list

Type 2 - Only the recent sets with a restricted and banned list

Now there were many more versions of play styles:

Vintage - Type 1

Legacy - Type 1.5

Modern - Eighth and up

Commander (EDH) - 100 card with a legendary commander and only one card of any type

Standard - 2 most recent blocks with the current core

Block - only cards in a specific block

There are many other types of deck types, but with these major ones in mind, I decided to separate my cards so that it would be easier to build decks off of that.  I split up my collection into 3 different types:

Pre-Modern

Modern

Standard

This way I would be able to build a Vintage, Legacy, or Commander deck out of all the different collections.  Then if I wanted to play Modern I would go through the Modern and Standard collection.  Standard would of course just be pulled from the Standard collection.  If I ever wanted to play Block, I would have to go to the specific collection that the block existed in.  Considering that Cold Snap was released awhile after the Ice Age block, but is considered Modern legal I would have to pick the cards out of two collections.

Either way, I had a way to split up my cards into manageable collections so I could keep things straight and not have to go through a ton of boxes to build a Standard deck.  And I picked the Standard playing decks because when I started playing again my goal was to always play Standard, but you will find out later that I switched to Commander because of cost.

Now that I had the general purpose collections in mind I started the sort.  Splitting up all the cards into their sets, and then placing the sets into boxes that were Pre-Modern, Modern, and Standard.  Next we will talk about the card count in the collection as to how many of a single card I would keep of any one set.